USA Today's 'Inside TV' turns its gaze on magazine land

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Feb, 2002 by Mark Miller

After 12 years of delivering the lowdown on programming changes at "Dateline," and the evening-news ratings race, Peter Johnson is turning his attention to the machinations over at Talk and masthead shakeups at Cosmo.

Johnson's "Inside TV" column for USA Today is expanding beyond the TV set to cover the people and personalities behind magazine, radio and newspaper news. Folio: spoke with him about the impetus for the change and his approach to the extended beat.

How are you expanding the column?

Basically, I'm going to go wild with it, like I've been doing with TV for the last 12 years. Everything but the Internet, because we have people who do that.

Why make these changes now?

Some of us at the paper have felt for a while now that magazines and newspapers and radio were, to a large extent, slipping through the cracks. For one reason or another, our readers weren't hearing anything about those areas. People are fascinated by all that's going on in the magazine industry, all the trends that are developing, the downturn in advertising of late, all this intermingling of magazines and television. [For example], you get an exclusive interview with a magazine and then an exclusive interview with a newsmagazine--all that synergy is being played out.

Obviously, in covering the television industry I read a number of magazines and newspapers every day, and listen to a fair amount of radio, so it just seemed like the smart thing to do.

What angle will you take in covering magazines?

I'm going to focus heavily on the people in the magazines who are running things and writing the stories. I don't see myself writing a lot of stories about ad lines and stuff like that. That's not my area of expertise, nor is it my area of interest. I've always been more interested in the people and personalities behind the news.

I've been a reader of The New Yorker for a 100 years, so I'll probably be touching base with them to see how that magazine continues to change.

Will you cover the business side?

When economic information affects editorial content, of course I'll be interested. For instance, if a magazine has fallen on hard times and its reporters can't travel and their phones are being cut back or their expense accounts are being cut back, and they're bitching about it--believe me, I'm going to try to be all over that. Everybody is tightening their belts. How does that affect their coverage? I'm very interested in that.

And I'm going to pay a lot of attention to coverage of the war. If I can't report on it, I can tell you what Newsweek is saying about it in a nice little capsule form. I think that's something USA Today has always been really good at, giving people sort of a capsule account of what other people are saying. I see that as a useful service.

How often will the column run?

We're thinking it'll be four days a week, Monday through Thursday. It's helpful, in covering a beat, to have a daily presence. Howard Kurtz, for example, has a media column once a week for the Washington Post. But by doing it four times a week, people will know you're going to be there every day and can rely on your column--and look forward to it. And I look forward to writing it. I have a lot of experience putting out a column four days a week. I know what it entails, I know what people are looking for, and I think I'm pretty good at it.

How will you structure the column to present the different media?

I envision it as literally a mix of the different media. On any given day, for instance, if there's something particularly interesting about Talk, I might devote the entire column to it. Similarly, if something is going on over at "Today" that I feel deserves an entire column, I might devote the entire column to the "Today" show and do nothing on magazines. But on a day-in and day-out basis, it'll be just like my television column has been--and that is that there's a lead item and then there are several other shorter items, and some briefs at the end. On any given day, it could be devoted entirely to a magazine, especially if I find it interesting.

And if I have an exclusive, I'll play it up.